What’s New in the World of Social Media? October Recap

Social platforms are constantly updating and changing, just take a look at the news from Facebook this past month. They seem to have stole the show this October with acquisitions, new features and even a way to order food. Learn more about Facebook and the changes to all of our other favorite social media platforms below.

Facebook Debuts Alternative News Feed

Facebook is officially rolling out an “alternative” news feed, which has a very similar feel to the Explore feed on Instagram. According to Adweek, those who try the Explore alternative (available via Facebook’s drop-down menu) will see a feed made up entirely of content from publishers—both pages followed and not followed by users. The pages will include popular articles, videos, and photos, automatically customized for each person based on how they use the platform.

Instagram’s New Feature: Superzoom

The name just about says it all. Superzoom allows users to zoom in on a single object within a video and create three-second cuts. When users log in and open their camera, they’ll see Superzoom next to Boomerang as an option under the record button, and tapping that button makes the camera automatically zoom in and record (with suspenseful music!). From there, users can message to their friends through Instagram direct or add to their Story. To learn more about Superzoom and some of the Halloween features that Instagram released in October, check out their blog.

Facebook Acquires Teen-Focused TBH

Facebook announced its acquisition of positivity-focused polling startup TBH (To Be Honest) and will allow it to operate somewhat independently with its own brand. According to Social Times, TBH has scored 5 million downloads and 2.5 million daily active users in the past nine weeks with its app that lets people anonymously answer kind-hearted multiple-choice questions about friends who then receive the poll results as compliments. This app is primarily used by teenagers who are favoring Snapchat and Instagram over Facebook.

Facebook Resumes on the Way?

Facebook is currently testing a new resume feature that lets users share their work experience with their friends. This new feature allows users to expand on their work details within their profile. According to The Next Web, at this point, the few users who have this feature indicate that the detailed information will not readily show up on their public profiles. This could mean that Facebook is considering making the hidden resume details available exclusively to job hunters and talent seekers. Is this Facebook’s first move towards adding similar features to LinkedIn?

Snapchat Debuts Context Cards

This past month, Snapchat rolled out Context cards. Through this new feature, users can discover new places, scope out the hours of operation and book a ride, all from within the app. As Mashable astutely notes, the model Snapchat is chasing resembles WeChat, which is China’s most popular app. WeChat has been labeled as a holy grail in social media with Facebook and other platforms all attempting to follow in their footsteps.

Dinner is Served on Facebook

Never content with being the most used social network on the face of the Earth, Facebook is always adding new capabilities, and the latest is ordering food. By clicking on ‘Order Food’ in the ‘Explore’ section, users can coordinate pickup or delivery with a handful of delivery services and restaurants, all without ever leaving the platform. Here at Matter we have played around with it a bit, and the functionality is clean and easy to use, but that, of course, is no guarantee of success.

Twitter Will Soon Allow Users to Save Tweets

According to Adweek, a longstanding request from Twitter users has been the ability to save tweets in one place. Up to this point, Twitter hasn’t allowed users to save tweets in one central location, which led to people finding all sorts of creative ways to go about it, including favoriting tweets so they could find those tweets later, direct messaging articles to their own accounts and so on. Twitter is currently collecting input from from users and marketers through a hashtag, #SaveForLater, on how they best envision this being executed.

LinkedIn Creating Tool to Gauge Talent at Companies

LinkedIn is aiming to release two new types of talent insights for recruiters in the summer of 2018. The first report, Talent Pool, will help recruiters discover where talent lives, how hard it is to hire for certain skill sets, which schools produce top prospective employees and more. The second report, Company, will track from where a company gains talent (and to where it loses that talent), which skills at a company are growing the fastest, tips for recruiting strategies and more.

Young Adults Prefer Instagram, Snapchat to Facebook Messenger

It is not exactly breaking news at this point that young adults prefer Instagram and Snapchat as their social platforms of choice. In light of that, eMarketer lowered its growth projection for Facebook Messenger users through 2021, with Instagram and Snapchat picking up the slack. As always, it’s worth noting that Facebook’s Messenger app is still extremely popular, with more than 125 million people using it in 2016. So, Messenger isn’t going anywhere soon, but as time goes on, Snapchat and Instagram are likely to gradually close the gap. For more social use statistics, check out this article.

Snap Accelerate for Startups

According to Adweek, there is a new way to advertise on Snapchat, and it goes by the name of Snap Accelerate. The service is designed to make it easier for startups and new organizations to use Snap ads, with the platform adding that “growth-stage mobile startups with digital expertise and performance-based, direct-response mobile marketing strategies” are best-suited. Snapchat will select a small number of companies to partake in the launch of Snap Accelerate, which offers media and creative services rolled into the package. Wall Street analysts haven’t been pleased with Snap’s revenue since the March IPO, so the ghostly app’s head honchos will no doubt be hoping that Accelerate helps to ameliorate this.

TV Chatter Keeps Thriving on Twitter

Twitter faces a number of different challenges as a company, but the little blue bird maintains a great relationship with TV. A recent analysis from the Video Advertising Bureau has found that at least one-half of trending Twitter topics on a given night were related to TV programs, and that 60% of TV superfans say they share thoughts on their favorite shows via Twitter. All this goes to show that while Twitter may never dominate the social scene, it still has a very firm grip on its niche, with television being a big part of that.

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